REMEMBERING LLOYD CROSS
-by Ana Maria Nicholson
It was the 70’s and holography was in the air. My husband Peter was making sculptural pieces that were reflective using mylar, and he thought holography with its ambiguity of space and volume would be useful for his work. We were living in New York and did not know where to go since most of the work in the medium was at the University of Michigan.
A few days later we were invited to a party given by a fellow artist. We started to talk to a middle-aged woman from Michigan. I don’t know how we got to the topic of holography but she vehemently said that to see any holography one had to get in touch with Lloyd Cross, a physicist in Ann Arbor. He was the expert. Well, An Arbor was a long way away and we dropped the idea.
At that time we were living in a loft on Prince St. in New York and would spend the summers in Vermont. We had just driven back and were sitting in the car which was stuffed with our belongings and our three year old son trying to decide what would be the least painful way to transport them to our loft, when a man walked up to the car and asked if he could help. Lo and behold, he was Lloyd Cross who had rented a loft for the summer in our building.
Lloyd Cross, the genius behind holography was in our building! He had been a physicist at the University of Michigan and been involved in the development of the Masers and lasers which led to the rediscovery of holography. He dropped a lot of acid and decided that he was finished as an academician and that holography had to be taken out of the laboratory and brought to the general public.
He had started a new company to monetize holography and had arrived in New York with some lasers and a number of holograms.
I remember to this day going over to his loft and seeing a hologram for the first time. It was love at first sight. there were these images behind the plates floating free, dematerialized existing in an ambiguous space. They had the quality of dream images, of images from another, more spiritual world. I knew at that moment what my role was in this lifetime, somehow to get involved with the medium and help make it popular and accessible.
Lloyd Cross and the San Francisco School of Holography
-by John Fairstein